Ancillary Unity and the Present Tense

It is written that there can be no science of the fleeting. If this is truth it should seem that for us, children of the fleeting time, there can be no science at all—a contingency which the experts have done little to assure. Kant at least, with his two inseparable stems of an unknown root, shall remain hopeless of any punctual unity of cognition in the present or in any other tense.

We have criticised Kant for inadvertence—as in his call for gravitation to “hold the universe together,” and his description of space as “an infinite quantity,” and his notion of reality “fading to zero by degrees”; but we have not heretofore charged him with self-contradiction. Yet it must now appear that his most recondite studies had neither united nor unravelled those intricacies of the present tense which ever recall that well of Democritus, between whose implacable walls Truth escapes in an infinite divisibility. Neither do we find the embarrassment much abated by the discontent of Messieurs Bergson, James and others with a merely conceptual division between the future and the past—they demanding a perceptual and empirical reality in the present, which the past has lost and the future has not yet attained.

As for Kant, we may readily indicate the diversity of his viewpoints. In his “Transcendental Analytic” (M. Muller, tr., p. 150) he says: “In mere succession existence always comes and goes (?) and never assumes the slightest quantity.”

Yet on page 169 this is explicitly reversed: “Between two moments there is always a certain time, and between two states in these two moments there is always a difference which must have a certain quantity. . . . Every transition from one state into another takes place in a certain time between two moments—a state between two states.”

This naïve reverie merely shares the popular confusion, and lacks any principle of definition. Rather, in fact, he disclaims any defining principle, saying: “All laws of nature, without distinction, are subject to higher principles of the understanding, which they apply to particular cases of experience. . . . Experience furnishes each case to which a rule applies.”

This is the essence of pragmatism: that experience furnishes the “rule” of reason. What works explains.

There is this to be said for Bergson, James, and their followers, that if there is any radical difference between life and death, or between being and not-being, or in fact between this varied and wonderful universe or multiverse and nothing at all (if this may have any meaning), there should be a radical difference between the present tense and either the future or the past. We can hardly outflank the postulate that only what it is real; yet neither can we conceive how a nature that is only as and while becoming can fully have become and wholly be. Yet if we know at all we know that we are. Life is real, it is earnest, it is punitive. A rap on one’s head gives a conviction of reality that no idea can come forth from it and refute. However naïvely or unphilosophically, we do habitually assume a certain breadth and fullness of duration in the moment. Its apprehension is expansive. Our ancillary Cinderella clings to and drags back the skirts of the reluctant past with one hand, and with the other reaches forth to anticipate the future. And just here is the crux of philosophy: while the fact is real enough, what have we to say about it—is it a concept or a percept, or both, or neither, for explanation or truth?

Clearly perceiving that a merely conceptual or ideal division between the past and the future does not do justice to the vital and in one sense exclusively present, James proposed (to spite the “intellectualists,” possibly) that reality must come in definite empirical “pulses,” “drops,” “beads.” (M. Bergson say “explosions.”) I quote James’s posthumous “Problems of Philosophy,” page 155:

“Either your experience is of no content, no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by beads or drops of perception.”

Had any one else made this assertion in the presence of my dear friend, the proponent would have been immediately advised of its crudity and one-sidedness, as merely “one way of putting it.”

Of course there is a certain warrant for this suggestion of beads and drops and pulses, in the nature of sensation, as involving the alternation of attention and rest. Sensation comes in change; there is no call of attention to the same. And the grades of difference, in the time during which an attention is held, determine the length of various functions and features—such as words and phrases, sermons and plays, visits, vacations, et cetera. There are many ancillary averages of stress and strain in the business world.

The earth itself has its tidal pulsations and climatic compensations; everywhere there is trend and check. The wound-up world delivers its resilience to the swing of some inexorable pendulum, else the too-eager bud would explode into its flower; the incontinent potential would rush into the arms of the actual, and “the secret too long pent” would dissolve in we know not what of fiasco and calamity.

But the philosopher’s trouble begins with the attempt at explicit definition, in the shading of these beads and pulses into one another in a continual process. The fault appears in conceptually punctualizing the attack of thought upon experience, in a centre-to-centre directness which excludes all collateral and ancillary supplement or adumbration. There is a penumbra which defeats the exactitude of every assumed connection. There is no explicit categorical punctuality in either our physical or our mental vision. The pupil of the eye—and of “the mind’s eye” as well—is large; it covers more than we look at. However we focus our attention, there is a field of vision in which any intrusion is apprehended.

It is but a whim, saying that while we may see one object we must count three. I can see three by the same intuition in which a proofreader detects an error in a word, by the shape of it. This is not as saying I can see seven. While my capacity is open, the entrance is limited; like Mercutio’s wound, it is not as wide as a church door, but it will do. It is large enough to see motion, as several places in one time, Zeno to the contrary notwithstanding.

What have been characterized separately as understanding and sense are so pragmatically interpervasive that they are only hypercritically distinguishable. The large pupil of the mind’s eye vacates conceptual contradictions by factual experience.

The empiricists have sought to staunch their specialty by citing the stoppages in the production of the connected sections of a cinematographic film. The theory claimed as exemplified in the manufacture of the films is that between the sections, photographed one after another, there is a distinct pause for each picture, determined by and known from the construction of the photographing apparatus—following the ingenious and interesting conceit that the light requires time in which to act upon the collodion. This dead stop in the current time appeals to the empiricists as the bead, or drop, or pulse of the present tense, disrupted, however briefly, from the current time.

But this is a very negligent hypothesis. Either of these beads, as a perceptible bulk, is capable of an infinite division, in search of its ideal centre, which alone could be the “true” present. And practically speaking, the machine can make the beads thick or thin, according to its rapidity in taking the pictures.

Moreover the notion of this dead stop may be rather clever than accurate. Possibly the light might act upon the collodion while passing, as well as when standing still. A stick swished through water does not need a stoppage in order to get wet. But the chief interest of the cinema machine is not in its presumptive demonstration of a stoppage of motion to realize the present tense, but rather in its proof of the possibility of motion, which Zeno and his followers denied—claiming that motion in the present instant would require that a perceptual object should have at least two places in one and the same time, which they regarded as an impossibility.

Speaking of Lange and his “History of Materialism,” I remarked upon his calling Kant to account for omitting motion from his list of categories, or native forms of mentation. Kant himself in a single instance classed motion as of that character. It would be a borrowing of trouble, discussing here whether or not motion is within the grasp of “quantity, quality, modality and relation”; the possibility of motion will be determined by consideration of time, space and vision as punctual unities—which they are not.

Observe first, in the case of a “motion picture”—say of the uplifting of an arm—that the real motion of the film and the picture-motion on the screen, although synchronous are not coincident; the arm may move three feet in the picture while moving three inches in the film; and this discrepancy may be exaggerated by moving the screen. The fact to be noticed here is that the motion on the screen is not of the identity of the sections of the film, but of their difference, which is mental; the motion consists in the unity of several sensuous places in one mental time.

When you whirl a curlicue with a burning torch, and make a fiery ring, the ring is motion; it is the infinite present places of the torch in one instant of mental vision, or time. Your vision is not of the torch, which shows no form, but of the manyness of its own present tenses and places in a one time for you.

It may be helpful to recall here our observations on the subject of size, as to an eye supposed as large as the earth; that the 1,000 miles per hour of the earth’s peripheral motion would be withdrawn into the potentiality of the eye—the Many of individual experience into the creative One, which is Creator not by effort or intention, but by essential and eternal reason. So in the motion-picture, where the movement of the arm is (not quite wholly) the difference of the sections of the film, the apparent sweep of the arm is graduated by the distance from the camera to the screen. The motion is relative, and real only in experience as seen from the dynamic viewpoint.

Some of these paradoxes of philosophy, and even of religion, are wholly gratuitous. Let Achilles himself propose the paradox, that he cannot overtake the tortoise, and we see at once that to be a philosopher he has to be a knave; the mathematical requirement of the feat is wholly impertinent to its empirical accomplishment.

The theoretical puzzle of Achilles is that in the punctual unity of each repeated effort he must achieve the distance between himself and the reptile at the outset—during which accomplishment the latter will of course have advanced somewhat: and this recurring somewhat, however short its space, renews the whole problem—for Achilles’ next effort is assumed to be spent in the covering of that space, while the tortoise gains a new one, offering the same difficulty in the mathematical impossibility of exhausting a whole by taking away successive fractions of it, since the remainder will ever be a whole. The absurdity of the story appears in the assumption that the athlete is intellectually hobbled, in his repeated efforts, punctually one by one, so that he may not continue to do his best as in the first endeavor, but must waste a whole unit on the little space which his rival has added to the course; and it is this restraint, which in practice he would never dream of (and which might be in another country), that encumbers an empirical proposition with a conceptual impossibility, uncalled for and impertinent.

The paradox is equally trivial when viewed mathematically. If Achilles must win in mathematical rather than in athletic form, he should have a “show” by the rules of the game. Given the premise that he has the superior speed, we demand the percentage of his superiority. If his excellence is 25 per cent., then in four units of any conceivable effort he will reach the tortoise, and win the race.

We may well doubt that Professor Zeno displayed these paradoxes on his centre-table for the delectation of his philosophical friends. But I have a mounted owl, from whose beak hangs a card bearing this question:

Was ist nicht?

No one of my visitors has answered it.

We cannot dismiss and dispose of motion as manyness of places—any better than we can shade entity to zero by degrees. There is a word or a thought missing here that shall grasp a vital unity in continuity and process and vanishing intensity as a whole, a category, a unique and ultimate given mental fact. What boots a mere manyness without a limiting discretion telling how many? We are out for blood, for the life of reality in one entity. If motion’s manyness has forty thousand places the category’s great revenge has stomach for them all. Time warns us of a continuity without discretion—the matter of experience which conception violates by cutting it into formal pieces with which to effect a more punctual contact with the mind. Again we say the pupil of the mind’s eye is large. The most punctual centre is adumbrated with ancillary circles through which our closest inspection dives into the well of Democritus—the infinite divisibility between matter and form.

The thinker may readily juggle the consistency of motion and time, saying that each is a process, and they may advance coincidently, side by side. Unfortunately for this arrangement, time has but one uniform speed, while motion in any one time may have various degrees of speed, and thus break the identity of that friendly adjustment.

If motion consists of manyness of places, a whole of motion demands a multiplicity and an extension in the imputed unity of time and attention. I see no hope for this in realization, as a science of the fleeting, except by an ancillary enlargement and a capability of the grasp of manyness in the nominal unity and identity of the spiritual one—a categorical faculty or thought-form for process, continuity, activity, motion, or in a word, time.

But all this is matter for philosophy, which the Mystic does not presume to explain.